Verbs, Bones, and Brains

Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Human Nature

Agustín Fuentes

Publication Year: 2017

The last few decades have seen an unprecedented surge of empirical and philosophical research into the evolutionary history of Homo sapiens, the origins of the mind/brain, and human culture. This research and its popular interpretations have sparked heated debates about the nature of human beings and how knowledge about humans from the sciences and humanities should be properly understood. The goal of Verbs, Bones, and Brains: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Human Nature is to engage these themes and present current debates, discussions, and discourse for a range of readers. The contributors bring the discussion to life with key experts outlining major concepts paired with cross-disciplinary commentaries in order to create a novel approach to thinking about, and with, human natures. The intent of the contributors to this volume is not to enter into or adjudicate complex philosophical issues of an epistemological or metaphysical nature. Instead, their common concern is to set aside the rigid distinctions between biology and culture that have made such discussions problematic. First, informing their approach is an acknowledgment of the widespread disagreement about such basic metaphysical and epistemological questions as the existence of God, the nature of scientific knowledge, and the existence of essences, among other topics. Second, they try to identify and explicate the assumptions that enter into their conceptualizations of human nature. Throughout, they emphasize the importance of seeking a convergence in our views on human nature, despite metaphysical disagreements. They caution that if convergence eludes us and a common ground cannot be found, this is itself a relevant result: it would reveal to us how deeply our questions about ourselves are connected to our basic metaphysical assumptions. Instead, their focus is on how the interdisciplinary and possibly transdisciplinary conversation can be enhanced in order to identify and develop a common ground on what constitutes human nature.

Cover

Title Page, Copyright

Contents

Introduction: The Many Faces of Human Nature

The past few decades have seen an unprecedented surge of empirical and
philosophical research on the evolutionary history of Homo sapiens, the
origins of the mind/brain and human culture. This research and its popular
interpretations have sparked heated debates about the nature of human...

1. Off Human Nature

What I would like to do is articulate an anthropological position on
human nature that is not official—there’s no statement on human nature
by the American Anthropological Association—but that I think is the
most consistent with modern understandings derived from contemporary...

Response I. On Your Marks ... Get Set, We’re Off Human Nature

I have long admired the extraordinary ability of Jonathan Marks to convey
ideas in ways that can turn an initially astonishing comment into
something so logical and unsurprising. Although I have given numerous classroom lectures on some of the key issues covered in his essay, his comments...

Jonathan Marks has given us a provocative and controversial discussion
of a concept that has played, and continues to play, a major role in post-seventeenth-
century science, philosophy, politics, and theology. Generally,
he is concerned with the question of whether it is meaningful to...

Response III. Off Human Nature and On Human Culture: The Importance of the Concept of Culture to Science and Society

In the early 1900s, the eugenics movement in the United States and Western
Europe had divided the world into fit and unfit individuals. Western
Europeans and those Europeans who had first migrated to the United
States were the most fit. The unfit were peoples from other countries, as...

2. “To Human” Is a Verb

The time is July 1885, the place Mount McGregor, to which the eighteenth
president of the United States, Ulysses S. Grant, has retired to
write his memoirs. On his deathbed, unable to speak because of the throat
cancer that was killing him, Grant penciled the following note to his doctor...

Response I. Free and Easy Wandering: Humans, Humane Education, and Designing in Harmony with the Nature of the Way

Almost thirty years ago I wrote a master’s thesis in Chinese literature titled
“Of Motion and Metaphor: The Theme of Kinesis in Zhuangzi.”
Somewhere in the many boxes that a packrat academic has accumulated
is a copy of that thesis. I did find the penultimate version in WordStar on...

Response II. On Human Natures: Anthropological and Jewish Musings

My family loves word games. There is one game, however, that while always
enjoyed nevertheless promises to provoke an argument. And it is
always
the same argument: what is a noun? Duple, as the game is known,
requires players to form words that include the specific letters that they...

Response III. The Humanifying Adventure: A Response to Tim Ingold

From a theological perspective, there are at least five decisive points in
Tim Ingold’s essay that should be regarded as a common basis of departure
for interdisciplinary anthropological research.
1. Persons are relational entities. Human personality is shaped in reciprocally
constitutive...

In philosophical and theological anthropology (as in other fields), theoretical
positions are typically expressed by short descriptive labels.1 For
example, theories about the nature of persons with reference to embodiment
are designated by labels such as body-mind dualism (or body-soul...

Response I. “Self-Organizing Personhood” and Many Loose Ends

Developing models of human nature is not an easy task. It is easy to fall
into reductive positions, which are unable to account for complex processes,
or to get lost amid a broad set of variables of unpredictable outline.
With great skill Warren Brown and Brad Strawn avoid both dangers and...

Response II. A Last Hurrah for Dualism?

I would like to focus on just two paragraphs in the first section of Brown
and Strawn’s essay, where the authors make a number of claims about
human nature. The remainder of their essay is a complex and learned
defense of a kind of nonreductive materialism (which may actually be a...

Response III. Why the Foundational Question about Human Nature Is Open and Empirical

Philosophers have long debated what I term the “Foundational Question”
about human nature: What deeper kind of thing are we? Or, put another
way, what kind of individual is a human? Recently, scientific and wider
debates over human nature have flared to life. One might expect these...

4. Human Origins and the Emergence of a Distinctively Human Imagination: Theology and the Archaeology of Personhood

For a philosophical theologian deeply committed to interdisciplinary
dialogue
with the sciences, the privilege of being directly involved with
the intriguing issue of human origins for the past few years has been both
enriching and an extraordinary challenge. Most important, I have learned...

There is nothing more visual, recognizable, powerful, indeed even individual
and personal than the human face. With only a few exceptions,
such as identical twins, each human face is unique, serves as a visual signature
to others, and exists as a material manifestation of individuality...

Response II. Imago Dei and the Glabrous Ape

C. S. Lewis declares, “Man’s conquest of Nature [one might say in this
context, human nature] turns out, in the moment of its consummation,
to be Nature’s conquest of Man.” What is a human being? We are rational
animals and as such exceptional: we seem a species apart, uniquely one...

5. What Is Human Nature For?

During the battle of Iwo Jima in June 1944, Private First Class Jackylin
Harold Lucas and three other U.S. Marines came under attack while
making their way along a ravine. Upon seeing two grenades thrown near
the soldiers, Lucas dove onto one grenade and pulled the other under his...

Response I. The Difficulties of Forsaking Normativity

I applaud Grant Ramsey’s affirmation that human nature is both a valid
subject of scientific investigation and a relevant consideration in the process
of making sound ethical judgments. His own conception of human
nature as the pattern of clustered antecedent-consequent traits across...

Response II. Some Remarks on Human Nature and Naturalism

First, I would like to thank Grant Ramsey for his highly interesting and
original view on what human nature might mean. In what follows, I
briefly comment on some aspects of Ramsey’s view that I find persuasive
and useful. As will soon become clear, I am sympathetic to Ramsey’s view...

Epilogues

Putting Evolutionary Theory to Work in Investigating Human Nature(s)

One of the main roadblocks to getting a full suite of disciplines to effectively
engage on the topic of human nature(s) is the failure to sincerely
read across areas and reasoning strategies. A substantial percentage of the
researchers thinking about the human and issues of human nature(s) do...

Moving Us Forward?

Why should we consider a forward movement when considering human
natures? The term implies that once we consider the variety of perspectives
as outlined in this volume there may be some tentative conclusions
that can be reached about where intellectual discourse needs to go next...

List of Contributors

n is Assistant Professor at the University of Notre Dame.
His research focuses on the integration of natural law and divine command
forms of Christian ethics, the contemporary theological relevance
of early modern thought, the prospects for a Protestant recovery of natural...

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